Carrier Pigeons Faster Than Internet In Rural England

Here's a funny stunt: To show how slow Internet speeds are in the rural parts of the UK, a guy raced carrier pigeons carrying memory cards against a YouTube upload. The carrier pigeons were faster!

The organizer of the stunt, Tref Davies, released two pigeons carrying a five-minute video on memory cards from a farm in Yorkshire, England. They flew more than 120km, and by the time they reached their destination only 24% of the 300MB video had been uploaded to YouTube.

As effective as this stunt is at drawing attention to the crappiness of rural Internet connections, it seems that the problem is one of compression more than Internet speed: A 5 minute video is 300MB??? Someone needs to teach those farmers about H.264. (Via Ars Technica)